• A parade of Indian people from many nations gathered in Seattle on Monday to commemorate the invasion of Fort Lawton 40 years ago, when more than 100 Indian people and their allies stormed the property and took a portion of the land “by right of discovery.” After a month of protests the government decided to donate a portion of the land for a cultural center.

• About 5,000 left-wing activists and Palestinians gathered Saturday to protest the eviction of four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

• About 30 people gathered outside the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Denver, Colorado on Sunday to protest a decision by the archdiocese not to re-enroll a child in a Catholic school in Boulder next year because the child’s parents are lesbians.

• Thousands of health care reform advocates gathered outside the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington yesterday, where the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans was holding its annual policy conference. They chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Insurance companies have got to go!” and staged a mass “citizens’ arrest” of the insurance executives.

• Days after staging protests on campus as part of the national March 4 Day of Action, a small group of students at Stony Brook University sat down in the hallway outside of President Stanley’s office for hours and begged passersby for spare change to cover the rising costs of tuition.

• People who care for injured inmates at California’s Alameda County’s jails are went on a one-day strike yesterday to protest what medical workers call “bad faith” contract negotiations.

• Hundreds of people rallied outside a Manhattan hotel Tuesday to protest a fundraiser held by the group Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week condemning the student protests in California for invoking the spirit of social justice movements from the 1960s and 70s. According to Robinson, the protests “demonstrated the entitlement mentality and self-absorption that has come to dominate much of higher education.”

We have here the vocabulary of the peace movement, of the struggle for decent conditions for migrants and other exploited workers, and of the civil-rights movement. Yet what did the protesters demand? Peace? Human rights? No. Money. And for whom? For the downtrodden and oppressed? No. For themselves. At a time when one American in 10 is unemployed and historic deficits burden both the federal government and many of the states, the protesters attempted to game the political system. They engaged in a resource grab.

Yeah, these whiny college students have it all: massive loan debt and a shrinking job market. Why should they complain about being exploited by the student loan industry or being victims of poorly managed state funds? So what if they have to spend more money to go to school longer or possibly not at all for a job that’s likely not waiting for them.

And what about the issues facing minority students that have also bubbled to the surface? I guess that doesn’t show that these protests are about more than just money or that they have something in common with the struggles of minority groups in the 60s and 70s.

It’s clear we all need a lesson in economic justice from Peter Robinson. How else are we going to understand why it’s not “entitlement mentality and self-absorption” when wealthy conservatives like Robinson and his colleagues at the Hoover Institution oppose taxing the rich?

Yup, if there’s one thing history has proven it’s that self-absorbed people love to protest, engage in nonviolent direct action, face possible arrest or even police brutality. Those are clearly the traits of people who feel a sense of entitlement, not people who feel burdened, exploited and marginalized.

Hundreds of thousands took part in the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education yesterday. It was the largest day of coordinated student protest in years. While much of it was focused on the university and state college campuses of California, where students face a 32 percent tuition hike, there were protests at campuses across the country on issues ranging from minority representation to privatization. According to Amy Goodman:

At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, police used pepper spray to break up a student protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society. Fifteen students were arrested. At SUNY Purchase in New York protesters took over the Student Services Building. Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill staged a sit-in at the chancellor’s office. In Washington state, the Olympia Coalition for a Fair Budget held a mock funeral for public education and healthcare and brought a coffin to the state Capitol building. And here in New York City, students and teachers at the City University of New York rallied outside Governor David Paterson’s office.

Watch the above Democracy Now! segment for more details.

The Move Your Money campaign started earlier this year seems to have gained some serious momentum. According to John Zogby, writing for Forbes:

Fourteen percent of all adults said that in the past year they have actually moved some of their banking from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union. We asked them why they moved their banking and listed several possible reasons. They could choose more than one reason. Based on that question, we found that 9% of all U.S. adults have taken some of their business away from big banks as a protest.

While this seems pretty encouraging, Zogby also noted that it’s hard to tell what effect the protest is having on the banks, as well as whether more people will get involved. But both sides of the political spectrum are taking part.

Our survey found Democrats more likely to be interested in moving their money out of big banks, but one-quarter of Republicans have also considered doing the same.

For Zogby, the ultimate question is whether this “big bank backlash” will force the Obama administration and Congress to reform the nation’s banking and finance. He isn’t holding out hope.

Bank reform is a much more an inside game with rules that are even more complex than those of health care. That, and the campaign contributions of bankers, gives the financial industry much more ability than any of the players in healthcare reform to shape legislation. Congressional challengers will hammer incumbents who voted for the bailouts, but their election won’t likely change how banks and Washington relate.

But he closes on this encouraging thought:

If enough Americans are serious about making big banks more accountable, they will need to do it themselves by taking their business elsewhere.

• Members of Greenpeace climbed the Benelux headquarters of Samsung, in Brussels, yesterday to protest its continued use of toxic substances despite committing to eliminate certain ones by 2010.

• More than 170 people gathered outside the RBC Annual General Shareholder Meeting yesterday in Toronto after a series of creative non-violent actions all morning to protest the bank’s leading role in funding the contentious Alberta tar sands.

• Over 200 University of California students went to the Capitol on Tuesday to oppose further cuts to higher education. Five were arrested for taking part in a sit-in at the office of Assemblyman Jim Nielson. A day of action is set to take place today in California and across the country to defend education at state colleges and universities.

• An Irish town council has removed a page in its guestbook signed by the Israeli ambassador to protest Israel’s diplomatic record after the alleged use of fake Irish passports by the Jewish state’s spies.

• Hundreds gathered at a noontime rally outside the New York State Capitol in Albany to protest Governor Paterson’s proposal to close as many as 90 state parks and historic sites for budgetary reasons.

• Environmentalists gathered outside the Presidential Office in Taiwan yesterday to call on President Ma Ying-jeou to change his policies and call a national convention on climate change.

• Hundreds gathered on the muddy grounds of Queen’s Park in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon to protest plans for a 900-megawatt gas-fired power plant in Oakville.

• Students at Sussec University in England are staging a sit-in to protest plans to make 115 staff redundant, which will close the environmental science degree and impact on English, history and life science departments.

Yesterday, Democracy Now! covered escalating tension and protest at the University of California San Diego over a spate of racist incidents over the last few weeks on campus, including the hanging of a noose in the main library.

Towards the end of the interview, which is cut off on the Youtube video above, Professor Daniel Widener says:

And I think that it’s very important that people throughout the country try to do what they can to mobilize to help us, whether that’s emailing our chancellor, chancellor(at)ucsd.edu, calling her office at (858) 534-3135, or looking at a website that the students have put out called stopracismucsd.wordpress.com. These are all things that people can do immediately now to help us build pressure for change.

• In Evansville, Indiana, a crowd estimated at 5,000 strong poured onto the shoulder and parking lot of the Evansville plant, protesting Whirlpool’s decision to shut down and ship jobs to Mexico.

• Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).

• Scores of Jordanian politicians and trade union members staged a sit-in at the Trade Unions Complex in Amman on Saturday to denounce Israel’s addition of two West Bank holy sites to a list of Jewish heritage centers.

• Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.

• In Nepal, the 48-hour sit-in protest of the Civil Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP), which began from Thursday in front of the Constituent Assembly building, to urge political parties to draft the constitution within the given time frame, concluded on Saturday at 8 am.

• Several Cuban dissidents say they will refuse food in protest at the death earlier this week of a jailed government opponent. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on Tuesday in a hospital in the capital Havana after a hunger strike of 85 days. His death triggered international protests and Cuban President Raul Castro issued an expression of regret.

• Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.

• Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.

• Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

• On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.

• Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.

• Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.

• More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Athens Wednesday after two of Greece’s largest trade unions organized a nationwide strike to protest austerity measures aimed at reducing the country’s public debt. But the largely peaceful rally of disgruntled workers was unfortunately disrupted by a group of violent youths who clashed with police.

• Hundreds of rallies took place across the nation on Wednesday—the eve of President Obama’s White House Health Care Summit—and over a million signed a petition sent to Congress urging lawmakers to “finish the job and pass real health care reform.”

• Environmentalists in Australia marched on New South Wales Parliament yesterday to protest plans for new coal power stations at Bayswater and Lithgow.

• 5,000 indigenous Dongria Kondhs of India trekked to the abode of their presiding deity Niyam Raja on Sunday and designated it as inviolate to protest a controversial alumina refinery and bauxite mine project.

• More than 320 students, faculty and community members gathered Wednesday afternoon to demonstrate for sub-contract workers’ rights at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

• Hundreds of students from several Jordan, Utah district schools walked out of their classes Thursday morning to protest announced budget cuts that could slash teacher ranks, increase class sizes and impact extracurricular activities.

• Nine days after an off-campus student party mocked Black History Month, UC San Diego went through a day of protests, on Wednesday, drawing attention to the small number of African American students enrolled at the beachside campus.

• Classes at a secondary school in Midland, Ontario were disrupted Wednesday morning when nearly 200 students walked out to protest rumoured cuts in programming.

As a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as through essays in many newspapers and websites, Ira Chernus has spent decades bringing the tradition of nonviolence to bear on concrete current events, particularly American and Israeli foreign policy. What drives him most of all, though, is his fascination with nonviolence as a profound intellectual tradition, and the passionate thinkers whose minds and imaginations inspire the more visible work of public, performative activism.

On a recent trip to New York, Chernus took the time to talk with me about his work. He has written several books, but the one we discussed most of all is American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which is available in print through Orbis Books, as well as for free, in its entirety, on his website. Culled from the lecture notes of the course on nonviolence he has been teaching for years, it is a definitive chronicle of the major thinkers who shaped the distinctly American lineage of nonviolence.

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Download (29:43, 13.6MB)

Here’s how it starts:

Waging Nonviolence: Why did you decide to write American Nonviolence as an intellectual history of nonviolence, specifically, as opposed to a history of movements and actions?

Ira Chernus: Part of the reason is just because that’s what I’m good at. If I’m good at anything, I’m good at ideas and being able to understand the underlying logic of a body of writing. Most of the major figures in the history of the nonviolence movement were not philosophers and certainly were not really theorists. They were leaders of movements that had to get jobs done. But in the course of their work, they offered a very, very rich body of ideas, but they didn’t lay them out systematically. Gandhi’s collected writings are, what, 93 volumes or something; he was writing at an incredibly rapid rate, and each thing he wrote was largely designed to meet the needs of a particular moment. He wasn’t thinking about laying out the overall intellectual architecture of his thought. He was not primarily a theorist. The same is true for Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, and any of the great leaders in the movement. But, as I read their work, I found that there was a very rich underlying intellectual structure there, and I believe—and maybe it’s just a leap of faith—that one of the things any successful movement needs is a strong intellectual structure.

For more, listen to the interview above.

Last week, the Boston Globe had an interesting piece about how the research of Boston College sociology professor Lisa Dodson led to her new book, “The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy.” As she was interviewing managers at stores that employed low-wage workers, she began hearing their discomfort with making enough to live well, while their workers were seriously struggling to make ends meet.

In response to this unjust situation, Dodson found that many managers participated in acts of what she calls “economic disobedience,” such as slipping “their workers extra money, food, or time needed to care for sick children,” in an effort to undermine the system. One story she tells is of Andrew, a manager at a large Midwest food business, who:

…said he put extra money in the paychecks of those earning a “poverty wage,” punched out their time cards at the usual quitting time when they had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment, and gave them food.

Andrew had decided that by supervising workers who were treated unfairly – paid too little and subjected to inflexible schedules that prevented them from taking care of their families – he was playing a direct role in the unfair system, and so he was morally obligated to act.

Not surprisingly, her book has sparked controversy for portraying such acts in a positive light. Some argue that she is essentially glorifying stealing from companies, rather than working through legal channels to try to rectify the situation.

I personally would tend to agree with Dodson, that these acts are moral. Corporations are not designed to care for the well-being of their workers. Their primary focus by law is on the bottom line and the interests of their shareholders, which are generally at odds with what would be best for the workers. (If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend watching The Corporation. It’s a documentary that came out a few years back that explores these issues and many more.)

I’d be interested to hear what you think. Are these acts of “economic disobedience” something to be lauded or is this theft by another name?

On the first day of Lent last week, I started my day with mass. I sat with my fellow students. I sat with Jesuits and sisters. I sat and waited to receive ashes. I waited and listened, searching for the meaning of the day. Hoping the priest would remind me why I was there; remind me what Ash Wednesday represented. If only after two decades of attending Ash Wednesday services I could be more grounded in the meaning behind the tradition.

But in my mind and in my heart, I was carrying my agenda for the day. I would not be returning to class after mass. I would be catching the el to head south. I would be a part of the dialogue at the Union League Club. I would be part of the presence outside of its doors. I would be sitting at a table and fasting through lunch. I would wait, and listen actively in order to assess the words of Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway as he gave his lecture, “Closing Guantánamo: Policy, Legal and National Security Concerns”.

As we traveled south, we read the cases of men imprisoned at Guantánamo. We read their names, their trials and the details of their continued detention.

When we reached the Union League Club, we opened our banners and we put on orange jumpsuits. We pulled hoods over our heads and processed to the front entrance.

There we stood. Masked. Solemn. Strong.

Our message read, “We are all human beings. End indefinite detention.”

Underneath the hood, I felt people stare at me. I felt their curiosity. I felt their indifference. I began to think of the men I represented. I began to imagine them standing in my place, on the streets of Chicago, as people walked by and nodded, as people walked by and gawked. I wondered at the shame one feels as a prisoner, made to wear a hood, made to wear a costume, made to feel inhuman. I wondered at the powerlessness of standing erect in the face of indifference, imprisoned.

I had the choice to walk away. I had the choice to drop the banner. I had the choice to go to class. I had the choice to fast. The men at Guantánamo do not have these choices. Their protest is met by force-feeding.

Read the rest of this article »

On the one hand, as a new CNN poll shows, 11 percent of Americans identify with the movement. That’s a much larger portion of the population than I would have guessed. Think about it, one in ten!

On the other hand, as blogger Juan Cole pointed out, twice that percentage of the population favors socialism. Yet socialism gets far less media attention. In fact, according to Cole, Tea Party received 15 times as many mentions in the media last month as socialism.

The CNN poll also breaks down the Tea Party demographics to show that the movement is disproportionately comprised of white men with higher-than-average incomes, who live in rural areas. While that’s not exactly the picture of average working class Americans some say compose the movement, I can’t help but wonder if 30 million Americans fit the description of white, male, educated and rich. I won’t say the data is flawed, but it does confuse me.

Let’s continue to assume that the Tea Party movement is a relatively large, but homogeneous, group of people. Can such a movement succeed? The recent indigenous protests in Peru had some level of success with probably fewer people. Of course, they were fighting for a very specific and defined cause, rooted in social justice. The same cannot be said for the Tea Party movement.

I won’t argue that excessive government spending isn’t a legitimate gripe, but to mainly attack social programs and not the defense budget is rather inconsistent. A recent article by the vice president of the CATO Institute, of all things, pointed out this flaw:

The Tea Partiers insist they’re nonpartisan, devoted only to staving off our looming fiscal apocalypse by any means necessary. If so, they can prove their authenticity by backing substantial cuts in entitlements and defense.

Tea Party pressure has already forced President Obama to call for a three-year freeze of nonsecurity spending. But that’s just 16 percent of the federal budget. You could zero that out entirely next year and still end up hundreds of billions in the hole.

Rail against earmarks, foreign aid and “welfare queens” to your heart’s content. But all that comes to a rounding error in a $3.7 trillion federal budget, over 75 percent of which consists of defense and entitlements.

[...]

The Tea Partiers — often thought to be hawks — might further demonstrate their credibility by calling for cuts in the Pentagon’s $663 billion bottom line.

If the Tea Party Movement followed this advice and made its demands clear and consistent, it might be something to take seriously. I’d be willing to forget its demographics if its message was more on point and honest. But as long as it associates with Sarah Palin and Republican Party politics, it will likely remain lost to its own potential. Perhaps, this is just more evidence of the need for a left movement that takes on defense spending and shows it to be the real root of our problems.

In this fascinating video, neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a brief overview of the recently discovered mirror neurons, or what he likes to call “Gandhi neurons,” at a recent TED conference. As he describes in his talk, a mirror nueron is a motor neuron in your brain that:

fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it’s as though this neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view. It’s almost as though it’s performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person’s action.

Ramachandran then describes another type of mirror neuron that works similarly with the sense of touch:

Read the rest of this article »

Here is a interesting report by Franklin Lopez of the Vancouver Media Co-op that aired on Democracy Now! about the developing protests around the Winter Olympics which began in Vancouver today. To thwart positive coverage of the protests, Canada has stopped at least two American journalists from entering the country this week, including John Weston Osburn of Salt Lake City and Chicago radio journalist Martin Macias.

Thoughts from Dane County Jail

On entering the Dane County Jail, the first holding cell that Brian Terrell and I were placed in had only one other person. We previously saw this man outside the cell during our initial booking. He was a man with dark black skin and a full beard. I thought I heard one of the officers say he was from Gambia. When we entered the cell, the man was in mid-ritual in what appeared to be a Muslim’s midday prayer. A young white guard, who had the accent of a Midwesterner, looked disdainfully at the man and then somewhat positively at Brian and me. The guard said, “Just ignore that,” as if the man was insulting or threatening us by his peaceful act of prayer. To which I replied, “It’s fine with me.”

This experience was contrasted by the next encounter I had with another officer who made digital copies of my fingerprints and pictures. As this middle-aged man placed my hand on the machine, I made a remark that I was surprised that he did not already have my information handy. (This was the third time I was fingerprinted and pictured for this same charge.) He said, “Oh yeah? You arrested a lot? What are you in for?” I told him that I was arrested with a group who engaged in civil disobedience at Ft. McCoy. Getting the sense that this man may have previously been in the armed services, I explained that we were not against the men and women in the military personally, but that our goals were to enter the base to talk to the rank and file soldiers about ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to make certain the soldiers were aware of their right to refuse illegal and immoral orders.

Before I could get all of this out of my mouth, the officer piped in abruptly and surprisingly, “I understand folks like you. I was in Vietnam, and this is the same shit happening today.” I said, “Oh yeah? What did they have you doing over there?” He replied, “Killing people and breaking shit, and this is just the same.” He gazed at me with a fierce intensity and honesty. I was now a bit nervous, feeling that I had asked too much too quickly. After a moment I said, “I’m sorry sir. I’m sorry they had you do that.” I continued, “Well, from my perspective, I don’t want any more young men and women to have to do what you did, nor to put themselves in harm’s way for a war that has no goals or objectives…” He cut me off. I was planning to finish my sentence with something like “…no goals other than bringing more profits to corporations and expanding the U.S. empire.” But he continued in an angry tone, “There was no goal then and there is no goal now. It’s all pointless.” I nodded my head in agreement.

A few more words were exchanged between us about the families being torn apart in the U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan. The disgruntled Vietnam Veteran, now turned law-enforcement officer, concluded taking my fingerprints. He then told me his name and again repeated something to the tune of “I can respect people like you.” After the unexpected bond of our short conversation, the feeling was mutual. Ironically, this same man sent me along the way to serve my jail sentence for speaking out against the crimes being committed by our government and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have now expanded to illegal drone strikes and extra-judicial killings in Pakistan and Yemen.

Until we build a culture that widely accepts that it is okay and necessary to resist war and injustice, I suppose that’s the way it will go. I don’t know when or if the day will come, but I look forward to the day of the “coming revolt of the guards” that our late brother Howard Zinn predicted; a day when veterans, soldiers, policemen and judges can stand together with civilians, workers and activists alike to put and end to any further senseless tragedies and atrocities.